
I love being bored.

It's a stupendously easy problem to solve with quick hits. It's not entirely novel to this generation — magazines, books, comics, television, etc. have had a hand in staving off what can be an uncomfortable feeling.

But I savor it when I can. It makes room for one of my favorite hobbies: Daydreaming.

Not enough credit is given to daydreaming. It might be that there's not craft to it, perse. There aren't daydreaming contests, there's no coach I can hire for it. Maybe people see it as lazy. It certainly doesn't fit into a puritan work ethic.

And yet, paradoxically, it's essential, even in pragmatic efforts. Software problems are often solved while doing the dishes. Books are written while on walks. And music is composed in that twilight realm between wake and sleep.

But, I'd hate to justify it with a specific outcome. Much like music teaching advocates who would only speak of the increased SAT scores for music students, I feel that we'd be missing the point.

I will say, writing is a fun vehicle for it. A nice balance of structure and flexibility. A place to watch thoughts crawl through the page, turning here and there, until a piece comes together.

But, nothing quite beats having time to stare at the ceiling and see where the thoughts go. There's a magic to it, ["between the click of the light and the start of the dream"](https://youtu.be/T703EHtdPwo?si=6s2lmcjNDICYXiXg&t=192).


Daydreaming as a Hobby


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[Another go](/mountainsrestarts) at a different rif!

[Thanks to Let's Talk About Math Rock](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoAYmxA4lX4) for the tabs and curated licks.


Mountains – Restarts (Intro)


![🌙](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-08-10.jpg)

🌘 🦊


Turquoise Sky


It's one thing to do work in spite of nay-sayers and critics. It's another, greater challenge to continue on in a direction different from where the admirers and allure of "success" draws you.

Tim Kreider exploring [the stubborn nature of painters De Chirico and Derain](https://timkreider.substack.com/p/the-ones-who-turned-back?r=4fpd3&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true):

> What I can’t help but admire about them is their indifference to critics and admirers alike, their untouchable self-assurance in their own idiosyncratic instincts and judgment. I admire their doggedly following their own paths, even if I’m not as interested in where they led. I admire their cussedness. It’s a value-neutral quality in itself, cussedness, amoral and inæsthetic, and not one you can really emulate, anyway—it would be like trying to imitate originality. But such artists’ careers demonstrate that it is at least possible to move through this world unswerved by its capricious granting or withholding of approval. They’re examples, good or bad, to their fellow artists as we all feel our blind, groping way forward—or, sometimes, back—through the dark of creation.

Kreider's closing metaphor on moving through "The dark of creation" is something that the richest creation [requires returning to time and time again](/darkcaverns).

_(Found while digging deeper on the always fantastic weekly newsletter by [Austin Kleon](https://austinkleon.com/), [this week on writing](https://austinkleon.substack.com/p/donkey-work).)_


Cussedness in Art


Several great nuggets of writing insight from Neil Gaiman's introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition of American Gods.

![Storm's coming...](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/books/american-gods.jpg)

Like [Carl Barks](/carlbarkslocale), Gaiman started with a locale:

> A couple of weeks later, my editor sent me a mock-up of the book cover. It showed a road, and a lightning strike, and, at the top, it said, “American Gods.” It seemed to be the cover of the book I had planned to write.
>
> I found it both off-putting and exhilarating to have the cover before the book. I put it up on the wall and looked at it, intimidated, all thoughts of ever finding another title gone forever. This was the book cover. This was the book.
>
> Now I just had to write it.

I think about this often, because it feels so true. Each project really does take its own path:

> I remember when it was all done in first draft telling Gene Wolfe, who is the wisest writer I know and has written more excellent novels than any man I’ve met, that I thought I had now learned how to write a novel. Gene looked at me, and smiled kindly. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he told me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.”

And then, of course, a great reminder to ship imperfection:

> I finished it, eventually, and I handed it in, taking a certain amount of comfort in the old saying that a novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it, and I was fairly sure that I’d written one of those.


Neil Gaiman on Writing

Faber - 100 Degree Blues


With friends, I've been talking for ages about how channels of communication have different feelings and expectations around them. Sending a work email feels different from sending an instagram DM, which feels different from texting, which feels different from sending a snap on Snapchat.

For me, the same is true for music apps. I have Spotify, Tidal, Bandcamp, and YouTube accounts with different musical tastes and moods. Especially since these apps all have algorithms for recommending music, I like each to be tuned into a certain mood.

It just feels strange having a Herbie Hancock album recommended next to the new Billie Eilish, even though I would listen to both!

SO I have my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist _fine tuned_ to curate a great mood for work with mostly instrumental music. BUT I have to manually save the playlist every week, or else it's gone to the ether.

Naturally, I was looking to automate the process! Having worked mostly in JavaScript and React so far, I saw it as a great chance to explore scripting in Python.

## What It Does

This light script does just a couple of things.

Of course, it gets and reads the current Discover Weekly playlist data, creates a new playlist, and adds all the new tracks to that playlist.

It also implements a custom naming convention. I have sock-drawer-level organization preferences for naming these playlists. I like to name these by the first track name and the date the playlist was created. Names end up being:

- An Old Smile 04/05/22
- Mirror Temple 03/28/22
- Apology 3/21/22

This includes a little bit of trimming – Some track names end up being ridiculously long, sometimes nonsensicle. (looking at you, [⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ](https://open.spotify.com/artist/1TIbqr0x8HoKzKBNtNN8wf), an _actual_ artist recommendation.) So there's a very simple shortening of the name if needed.

## Using Spotipy and the Spotify Web API

Spotify already has an exposed web API for doing just what I needed – creating playlists and adding tracks. Doing so, like other OAuth applications, requires providing user authentication and scopes.

To simplify the authentication and communication, I opted for the lovely [Spotipy](http://spotipy.readthedocs.io/) library. Simple and intuitive, the library handles the back and forth of authenticating the application with Spotify's Web API and holding on to all the tokens needed for requests to my user account.

## Creating a Class for Modularity

Although this could easily be a single script, I couldn't pass on the opportunity to bundle this code up in some way. I could see this project being extended to handle other playlists, like the Year in Review Playlists.

Maintaining state was a bit cleaner in writing a class as well. Storing the Spotipy instance and several other reusable pieces of state such as the list of tracks kept all the necessary information stored and self contained, ready for use by the class methods.

## Error Handling in Python

My first and primary scripting language is JavaScript. Like many other languages, error and exception handling is not necessarily a beginner topic. So it was surprising to me to be accounting for exceptions so early in my Python coding.

Handle them, I did. Each method is wrapped in a try / except block and logs messages unique to each function, to help keep track of where things will go awry.

## AWS Lambda

The script wouldn't be much of an improvement if I still had to open up a terminal and run it manually! Uploading to AWS as a Lambda function made sense since it's such a lightweight script that is purely interacting with Spotify's web API.

I used the Serverless Framework to streamline the process. Initializing the project with their CLI and customizing the config file, I was able to create a Cron Event Handler to fire off the function every Monday at 7:00 AM.

## Playlists Created on Request

One interesting thing I've noticed about the playlists is that on Mondays when I open up the official Discover Weekly playlist in the desktop App, it will sometimes still show the previous weeks playlist, and then later update with the new tracks for the current week.

I initially thought this would mean that Spotify only updates the playlists _after_ you make a request. If my script ran before that initial access, then it may be saving an old playlist instead of the newly generated one.

However, in practice, it seems it may actually have more to do with Spotify's app cache taking time to update. On logging out results from pinging the endpoint for the current Discover Weekly tracks, both from the first load and from a delayed request, both returned the new tracks appropriately. No need to change my code, but an interesting point to explore

## Try It Out!

If you, too, are an exceptional music nerd, you can give my script a whirl yourself! You can find my code [here at this github repo link](https://github.com/cdpadilla42/spotify-weekly-playlist-saver) with guidelines for setting up AWS Lambda and Serverless.


Chris Padilla/Blog

On This Day